ecame a part
of the commuting town of Crosshampton Harbor, not as the negligible
daughter of a Panama Captain Golden, but as a woman with the glamour of
independence, executive position, city knowledge, and a certain marital
mystery. She was invited to parties at which she obediently played
bridge, to dances at the Harbor Yacht Club, to meetings of the Village
Friendly Society. A gay, easy-going group, with cocktail-mixers on their
sideboards, and motors in their galvanized-iron garages, but also with
savings-bank books in the drawers beneath their unit bookcases, took her
up as a woman who had learned to listen and smile. And she went with
them to friendly, unexacting dances at the Year-Round Inn, conducted by
Charley Duquesne, in the impoverished Duquesne mansion on Smiley Point.
She liked Charley, and gave him advice about bedroom chintzes for the
inn, and learned how a hotel is provisioned and served. Charley did not
know that her knowledge of chintzes was about two weeks old and derived
from a buyer at Wanamacy's. He only knew that it solved his
difficulties.

She went into the city about once in two weeks, just often enough to
keep in touch with Truax, Fein, Chas., and Mamie Magen, the last of whom
had fallen in love with a socialistic Gentile charities secretary,
fallen out again, and was quietly dedicating all her life to Hebrew
charities.

Una closed the last sale at Crosshampton Hill Gardens in the autumn of
1915, and returned to town, to the office-world and the job. Her record
had been so clean and promising that she was able to demand a
newly-created position--woman sales-manager, at twenty-five hundred
dollars a year, selling direct and controlling five other women
salesmen.

Mr. Truax still "didn't believe in" women salesmen, and his lack of
faith was more evident now that Una was back in the office. Una grew
more pessimistic as she realized that his idea of women salesmen was a
pure, high, aloof thing which wasn't to be affected by anything
happening in his office right under his nose. But she was too busy
selling lots, instructing her women aides, and furnishing a four-room
flat near Stuyvesant Park, to worry much about Mr. Truax. And she was
sure that Mr. Fein would uphold her. She had the best of reasons for
that assurance, namely, that Mr. Fein had hesitatingly made a formal
proposal for her hand in marriage.

She had refused him for two reasons--that she already had one husband
somewhere or ot